TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT still have to be completed, but more than 250 of Government’s tax-collecting agencies’ workers have made the transition to the new Barbados Revenue Authority (BRA).
Word of this has come from the BRA’s Revenue Commissioner, Margaret Sivers.
The former Accountant General said on CBC TV’s People Business programme Sunday night: “At this point in time we have completed much of the transition of the staff. We would have transitioned about 259 of the 308 officers who are expected to be with the Barbados Revenue Authority.”
She added: “At most, we have about 75 temporary officers who have come over to the organisation and probably about 95 or so of the appointed officers who were with the revenue agencies have signed to come over with the Revenue Authority.”
The BRA is a merger of major tax-collecting agencies – the Land Tax, Inland Revenue, Value Added Tax, Licensing and Customs and Excise Departments.
Trade unionists had raised a number of concerns about the transfer of employees to the BRA, with general secretary of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), Dennis Clarke, saying that “cherry-picking” of jobs and favouritism, coupled with a failure to uphold agreements made “in the highest quarters”, had doomed the institution to a rocky and longer-than-desired transitioning period.
Sivers said terms of employment had not been completed because it was felt that the BRA’s staff needed to have an opportunity to read and digest them.
She said the agency would have a final document signed off by the NUPW and the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU).
According to Sivers, the “immediate” goal was to ensure that the staff, now “in transition”, was settled. “Once the staff is in place and the Revenue Authority can function, the immediate thing is to really and truly make sure that the systems are in place to facilitate what they are set up to do,” she added.
The agency was launched this month to enhance and strengthen Government’s revenue-collection capacity. BRA officials said there were also benefits for taxpayers, including the idea of being able to pay a bill at any one of about seven BRA locations in the coming weeks.
Former director of the Land Tax Department, Wayne Forde, now a BRA director, said the plan was to make the agency a “one-stop shop” for taxpayers. When that happened, “you can pay your licence at any branch, you can pay land tax at any branch”.
In the system, where a taxpayer could have just one ID number as opposed to one from each of the merged departments, it would be easier to “net off” some bills, Forde explained.
“If you owe the Inland Revenue Department and VAT owes you, we can net it off – and this is what we’re moving towards,” he said.
Sivers said that given the new ways of doing things, including viewing a single taxpayer across multiple systems, the agency had a lot of work to do and could take some time to settle down. In this regard, she asked the public to be patient.
BRA officials also said the agency would have a focus on customer service and being customer-friendly. (TY)
